2003-07-02 04:00:00 PDT Sacramento -- Rep. Darrell Issa, within months of leaving Army service in the early 1970s, was arrested twice on illegal-weapons charges, including an incident in Michigan that led to a misdemeanor gun conviction, The Chronicle has learned.

Issa's weapons arrests, when he was an ex-GI and college student, have come under new scrutiny as the millionaire San Diego County Republican attempts to oust Gov. Gray Davis in an unprecedented recall campaign. Issa's $1 million in donations have fueled the recall's momentum.

In a news conference Tuesday, gun control groups attacked Issa as an extremist friend of the National Rifle Association who would threaten assault- weapons laws. They showed a video in which Issa's campaign for U.S. Senate in 1998 operated a booth at a Los Angeles County gun show, where high-powered weapons and Nazi memorabilia were being sold.

On the issue of gun incidents, Issa in the past has answered questions when asked but never volunteered information. He has talked in general terms about a gun conviction, but court records reviewed by The Chronicle show that Issa was twice arrested in 1972 on weapons charges -- once in Ohio, once in Michigan.

'YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT'

Issa, speaking with reporters late Monday, implied that the issue of his gun conviction should be off limits in the campaign because it was personal and old. After the Michigan arrest, Issa was fined $100 and put on three months' probation, court records show. Issa did not mention the separate arrest in Ohio.

"I remember plenty of the details, but I don't think 30-year-old misdemeanors are fair play here," Issa said. "Look, I graduated from college, but my grades are nobody's business 30 years later, and I think we need to start looking in those terms. If you are looking at 30-year-old misdemeanors, I think you are missing the point. It's the felonies of Gray Davis that are on trial here today. What the governor has done to California is a felony."

Months before the Michigan incident, however, Issa was involved in another incident. Court records on file in Issa's hometown of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, show that in March 1972, one month after getting out of the Army, Issa was arrested on charges of carrying a concealed weapon and auto theft.

The incident, which involved Issa's older brother William, concerned the alleged theft of a new red Maserati sports car from an auto dealership. The court file doesn't indicate the type of weapon involved or other details of the arrest.

In May 1972, a grand jury indicted Issa on a larceny charge in connection with the car theft but dropped the weapons charge. Two weeks later, a prosecutor dropped the car theft charge as well.

Months later, when Issa was attending college in Michigan, he was fined $100 and put on three months' probation after being arrested for possession of an unregistered handgun, Michigan court records show.

The documents show that on Dec. 4, 1972, Issa was arrested by police in Adrian, Mich., a small city southwest of Detroit. At the time, Issa was a 19- year-old student at Siena Heights University, a Catholic college located in Adrian.

On Dec. 18, Issa pleaded either guilty or no contest to the charge, the records indicate. A magistrate fined him and put him on probation. He also was ordered to pay $107 in court costs, the records show. The records gave no other details of the case, and Issa didn't offer any.

"There is nothing to remember," Issa said Monday. "I paid a $100 fine, and it (the gun) wasn't mine, but it was something that was in my possession, and I paid the fine. It was a misdemeanor."

A 1998 story in the Los Angeles Times contained allegations that as a businessman in 1982, Issa had brought a gun to the offices of a Cleveland auto- alarm company called A.C. Custom. The newspaper said the incident had occurred the day after Issa had won a court order giving him control of the company because it had failed to repay a $60,000 loan.

According to the newspaper, Issa carried a cardboard box into the office of an A.C. Custom executive named Jack Frantz and told Frantz he was fired. Inside the box was a handgun, the newspaper quoted Frantz as saying. Frantz said Issa had invited him to hold the gun and claimed extensive knowledge of guns and explosive from his Army service, the newspaper said.

The newspaper quoted Issa as saying, "Shots were never fired. . . . I don't recall having a gun. I really don't. I don't think I ever pulled a gun on anyone in my life." His campaign has denied the incident in later interviews as well, saying it never happened.

Issa, now serving his second term in Congress after a failed 1998 Senate campaign, has come under intense scrutiny by the media and anti-recall groups in part because he is such a large donor to the effort and because he was the first candidate to announce he wanted to replace Davis.

Taxpayers Against the Governor's Recall demanded Tuesday that Issa "come clean" about his views on gun control. In an interview recently with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Issa said California's assault-weapons ban "is not an area of interest or concentration" in his gubernatorial campaign, but gun control groups labeled him an extremist.

VIEWS ON WEAPONS BAN

The NRA gave Issa an "A" grade for his votes in Congress during his first term, said NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. But he said the organization considered a series of remarks Issa had made recently on firearms issues "less than positive." Issa has both supported and expressed skepticism about extending the federal assault weapons ban, according to separate newspaper accounts, and voted against requiring gun dealers to keep background check records longer than 90 days.

"Darrell Issa wants to take us back to the time when assault weapons ruled our streets, where we didn't do effective background checks, when gun traffickers could buy guns in bulk, when kids could pick up guns," said Luis Tolley, California director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Jonathan Wilcox, communications director for Issa's gubernatorial campaign, said that Issa's performance ratings from gun groups such as the NRA "stand on their own" and that Issa "strongly believes in a law-abiding citizen's right to protect himself, herself and their family according to the law."

Wilcox also blasted what he called the "goon squad" from anti-recall forces for releasing information about decades-old gun charges and showing a videotape of the Great Western Gun Show from May 1998, where the Issa campaign set up a booth. The video showed people selling Nazi flags and German army helmets inside the show, along with hundreds of guns, and a lone Issa worker sitting outside the entrance of the show in a booth with a large Issa sign.

"The nature and tenor of the campaign is getting way off track," Wilcox said. "I am a little staggered that on July 1, the first day of the fiscal year with the state in an absolute financial free fall, that Taxpayers Against the (Governor's) Recall are advancing the issue of gun control and a misdemeanor 30 years ago. It seems very far afield from the problems we have today."